The Good, The Bad and The Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat and Other Whiskery Friends (19 page)

Something that Gemma
and I found out about one another not long after we met was that we both had, in our fairly recent past, a tragic story involving a maverick black and white cat: a cat we’d fallen deeply in love with in the years immediately after we left our family homes then lost, very suddenly. Each of these cats had been the first we’d chosen for ourselves as adults, and each had been cruelly snatched away from us before they were fully grown.

Even now, barely a week went by where I didn’t wonder what kind of cat Brewer, Ralph and Shipley’s brother, would have grown into, had he not been run over in the summer of 2001. Ralph was a huge, hulking mouser, but just before his death, Brewer had already possessed around twenty per cent more body mass than his tabby brother. In terms of prey, he had worked his way up from mice to rabbits to pheasants, and was visibly mulling over the idea of his very first peacock scalp. I imagined of the still-thriving Brewer a parallel life as a comical beast: a cat of such formidable size that his tail entered a room a full thirty seconds after his head, but who was possessed of a preposterously babyish meow, which he deployed to lull the local wildlife – ducks, herons, dogs, a particularly large and proud horse down the road who resembled the 1970s rock star Todd Rundgren – into a false sense of security.

Rod was much more
of a softy. He’d been tiny in 2007 when Gemma had adopted him, and was still smaller than ninety-five per cent of male cats seventeen months later, when he was hit by a car outside her flat in Plymouth. He’d never really liked to go out very much, and preferred the company of people to other cats. ‘I know some cats like baths, but he
really
liked baths,’ Gemma told me. ‘He’d try to jump in every time I was in one. He was a maniac. He loved sleeping in the fruit bowl, and climbing up onto the door frame and leaping off it. He’d do it with his legs splayed in this weird way, nothing like a cat at all. He also trusted everyone, which used to worry me.’

In many ways, the photo we received at the end of May 2012 was much like hundreds of others of absurdly sweet black and white kittens needing adoption that I’d been sent by readers of my first two books about my cats. The difference was the black and white cat history Gemma and I shared, the cooling of her ardour for the apocryphal Chip, and the fresh, gaping space in our lives that Graham had formerly occupied. That, and the fact that Roscoe, with her Batman mask face, white tuxedo, and a tail that appeared to have had its tip dipped in white paint, was an almost cartoon-perfect example of what we’d started to imagine as our next cat: a good solid version of what most people probably immediately think of when their mind focuses on the phrase ‘classic cat’. The kind of kitten that, when it was older, you might see staring back at you from the window of a pretty, wisteria-clad cottage as you strolled down a country lane in summer, in a way that said ‘Yep, I’m a cat. What do you plan on doing about it?’

That was what we
called her: Roscoe. We decided on the name with remarkable ease, considering our recent track record. It was a nod to several things: the magical song of the same name by the folksy, American Civil War-obsessed rock band Midlake, which we’d listened to on our way to collect her; our recognition of some early tomboyish hints about her character; and my thinking that I’d had a couple of boy cats with girl names in the past and it was time to even the score. There was also our belief that, if you called a kitten Roscoe, it could hardly be anything else but great. We were, however, quickly disabused of this notion.

It might have happened at a moment of weakness, but over time I have come to remember our adoption of Roscoe as a demonstration of remarkable restraint on my part. When I adopted Shipley, Ralph and Brewer, I walked into a stranger’s house planning to come away with two cats, at the most, and ended up with three. When I adopted Bootsy and Pablo, all I’d initially been in the market for was a beagle. Jazzmine, who’d sent me the message about Roscoe, had not one but three kittens that she wanted to give away, all of which lived with her in her house in west London.

I knew her ultimate
hope was that all of them would stay together, and that however strongly Gemma and I had resolved only to take one, we would waver once we saw the three of them sleeping in a tiny bundle, or running up the back of a sofa. As it turned out, it was an even greater test of our powers of resistance than we’d imagined: not only had I forgotten what an onslaught of cute a roomful of three kittens can be, there was something very familiar about Roscoe’s brother and sister. Roscoe was every bit as loopy, spirited and friendly as Jazzmine had promised and, within minutes of her introduction to Gemma and me, was climbing cheerfully along our shoulders. Her equally energetic black and white brother, however, was an almost exact hybrid of Rod and Brewer; while Gemma and I didn’t say so out loud, we both noticed it immediately and told each other so with our eyes.

Her sister, meanwhile, was familiar in an even more unexpected way. I’d never had the bittersweet privilege of knowing The Bear in his angst-ridden kittenhood, but I’d seen the sole photo of his kitten self that Dee had possessed when I met her, and it bore an uncanny resemblance to the four-month-old kitten I was looking at now. All of Roscoe’s family’s eyes were big and button-like, but those of this black cat seemed to carry an extra knowledge and wariness. ‘This one is easily the most intelligent of the bunch,’ Jazzmine confirmed. The Bear had tried his best with other cats all his life, but he couldn’t get away from the fundamental fact that they were intellectually beneath him. Had I finally found the cat – a female cat, no less – with whom he could have the cultural and political debates he’d long hankered for? The image of the two of them sitting on The Bear’s favourite bookshelf, like a pair of all-knowing black owls, was almost irresistible.

Somehow, we stayed
strong. Driving back up the M11 towards Norfolk from Jazzmine’s house with Roscoe alone in the basket on the back seat of the car, we were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves – smug, even – as if we were a couple of hardcore smokers who’d unexpectedly found a couple of quality menthol cigarettes in a pocket and each said, ‘No,
actually
, I won’t.’

It wasn’t until we arrived home that everything started to go wrong. Now I think about it, though, the switch probably took place at Birchanger Green services, just outside Bishop’s Stortford. Gemma and I had taken turns to go inside and use the toilet, so one of us was always with Roscoe, but while I’d been in the car I’d become distracted by an email on my phone from an editor. As I attended to it, the catnappers must have very gently eased open the rear door, unclicked the cat basket’s lock, and made the swap.

I have to give them credit: they’d done their research. The she-devil kitten they replaced Roscoe with was an almost perfect match. Same white socks, tuxedo, Batman-mask face and button eyes. Same white-tipped candle tail. This tiny, furious monster slept peacefully as we progressed through Essex and Suffolk, but once at its new home, it began a campaign of terrible destruction, slinking out of its basket to hiss and growl at everything in its wake.

Admittedly, we did
some pretty thoughtless stuff to Roscoe – or her doppelgänger, if that’s what this kitten really was – in those first seventy-two hours with her. There was the moment when I stood on the opposite side of the kitchen to her and sliced a bagel in half directly in her eyeline, or when Gemma loudly sneezed a mere seven feet from her face, or – perhaps most unforgivably of all – the time on the second afternoon when I said, in a soft, encouraging voice, ‘Would you like some of these overpriced turkey chunks, perhaps – maybe they would calm you down?’ Looking back, I am thankful that we had the kindness not to do anything really hurtful, such as vacuum, or play the album by 1970s progressive rock band Spooky Tooth that I’d recently purchased, as I fear we might not be here to tell the tale.

The noises emerging from Roscoe’s mouth were something I’d never expected to hear from any less than a medium-sized animal. Actually, that’s untrue. Some of them might not have been all that surprising if, say, they’d emerged from an iguana that had received some particularly bad news about its family, or maybe a raven that was having a lot of trouble shaking off a chest infection. From a kitten, however, they were unexpected. They only grew worse when we attempted to make a gesture to get her more comfortable with her environment, such as showing her the stairs (‘KAKkkkkkkcchssssssss!’) or introducing her to a catnip mouse (Awaaaaggheeeh!’).

‘How is
everything?’ texted Jazzmine, not long after we woke up on Roscoe’s second morning in the house. ‘Is she settling in OK?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ I replied. ‘Not sure if you spotted this yourself, but as it turns out, she is actually the miniature progeny of the monster who destroyed New York in the film
Cloverfield
. We’ve all tried to make it work as best we could, but after a long discussion, most of which involved her sitting behind a spider plant and going “Keeecheaggggggggh” at us, we’ve opted for an amicable separation. I’ve pointed her back in your direction. I’m hoping National Express is OK with you? Her coach gets into Victoria Station at fourteen minutes past ten. She’ll be the one sitting on her own, the one who all the other passengers are cowering from in abject terror.’ I didn’t really write any of that, but it would have been a more frank assessment of the situation than my actual reply: ‘Not bad. She’s a little subdued, but I’m sure she’ll be OK.’

That afternoon, I decided to be a bit more honest with Jazzmine. ‘Has Roscoe always been OK with other cats?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes, very much so,’ replied Jazzmine. ‘She was born in a house full of cats, so she’s always been ever so sociable. I hoped your cats would accept her, as I know she’ll like them. Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, nothing too much to worry about,’ I replied. ‘I’m just slightly concerned that she would like to slowly torture them then eat all of their kidneys. I’m sure they’ll all start getting on soon.’

In truth, it seemed
that Roscoe’s rage was too absurdly tiny and ineffectual to bother my cats. As she hissed and practised her bonsai growl at Ralph and Shipley, they appraised her in the manner a busy office worker might appraise a small, ugly insect he’d spotted moving around on top of a pile of loose papers he’d left next to his desk for a secretary to shred. The Bear came over and had a couple of analytical sniffs, which received a feisty rebuke, but didn’t have a lot to say on the matter, save for aiming a look in my direction that eloquently conveyed his despair at my continued habit of needlessly complicating my own life.

Gemma took a photo of me holding Roscoe at around this point, and we both went on to think of it as the one that encapsulated her first few days with us. Roscoe’s tiny mouth, wide open, articulates her fury at all the recent woes that have befallen her. I look a bit baggy-eyed, but I’m grinning, in the manner of a man who has just found out that dragons, while no less angry than the tales written about them suggest, have lovely soft fur and are actually only one-thousandth of their reported size. Beneath that grin, however, is a well-hidden layer of worry. ‘What if I’ve just been lucky?’ I’m asking myself. ‘What if I’ve just had a series of unusually lovely cats, and I’m about to be plunged into the harsh, bilious, affectionless reality of cat adoption that most people go through with man’s best frienemies?’

Every so often during those first three days, Gemma and I gently encouraged Roscoe to sleep on one of the many soft surfaces we’d provided for her, but she preferred to sit sourly on floors and sideboards, as if in stubborn protest at this austere and forsaken eastern land that she’d been dragged to from the cosmopolitan comfort of west London. We gently encouraged her to use her litter tray, but it remained, to all appearances, untouched. A cuddle, meanwhile, was entirely out of the question.

I began to look
upon Ralph, Shipley and The Bear with fresh eyes. Could I really say these cats had ever caused me any trouble? None of them had ever seriously injured me or one of my house guests, or given me cause for concern with his debauched, irresponsible lifestyle. For many years, each of them had kept their faeces and what they did with it mercifully far away from me, in the open air. They even each said a happy good morning to Gemma and me every day: Ralph with a chirrup, The Bear with one of his happier
meeeoop
s, and Shipley with a noise that, while it translated to something like ‘How are you doing, douchebag?’ always seemed to have a fundamentally affectionate undertone to it. And now what had I done? I’d gone out, and, in my thoughtless greed, got a younger model. I may as well have written them a note explaining that their love was no longer enough for me. If Roscoe truly was a monster, I deserved every bit of hardship she was going to put me through.

By her fourth night with us, I – who’d spent, if you overlooked a short period in my early twenties, getting on for four decades living with cats – was losing hope, and Gemma – she from the hardcore dog-loving family, whose conversion to cat servitude had only taken place during the last few years – was playing the role of optimist. ‘Maybe we should have taken her brother or her sister as well?’ I said, as Roscoe scowled out at the two of us from behind a piece of 1960s West German pottery, as if making a cutting comment with her eyes about not just my presence, but my taste too.